Writing Your Own Audio CDs

Writing Your Own Audio CDs

Finally, your files are in good shape. They're clipped to the appropriate length and sound balanced between treble, midrange , and bass. Now you want to burn them to an audio CD to preserve for all posterity (or maybe just to make some money selling it). There are several Linux utilities you can use, but all of them require the audio files to be in a PCM format, usually WAV. Because the files are uncompressed, a full CD's worth of WAV files will take up about 650MB. So you'll need to make sure you have plenty of disk space.

cdrecord is one of the most common command line CD-burning tools, but I'll wait to discuss it in the Audio CD Creation section of this chapter. Another good option is cdrdao, which is capable of writing audio, data, or mixed audio/data disks. To use cdrdao, you first create a table of contents file:

 CD_ROM 

 CD_TEXT { 

 LANGUAGE_MAP { 

 0 : EN 

 } 

 LANGUAGE 0 { 

 TITLE "My CD" 

 PERFORMER "Me" 

 DISC_ID "XY12345" 

 } 

 } 

 } 

 TRACK AUDIO 

 CD_TEXT { 

 LANGUAGE 0 { 

 TITLE "My First Song" 

 PERFORMER "Me" 

 } 

 } 

 FILE "mysong-01.wav" 0 

 : 

 : 

 more tracks... 

 : 

 : 

 TRACK MODE1 

 CD_TEXT { 

 LANGUAGE 0 { 

 TITLE "Video clip from First Avenue, 4/17/2000" 

 PERFORMER "Me" 

 } 

 } 

  DATAFILE "first-avenue-show.mpg" 0  

The man page for cdrdao describes the format of this file in detail; this example is fairly complex. The CD created by the file just listed would contain a number of audio tracks (however many the ellipses refer to) followed by a final data track containing an MPEG movie. Each track would have title and performer text associated with it. In contrast, a simple audio-only CD would use a first line of CD_DA, and have only alternating TRACK AUDIO and FILE "xxxx" 0 lines.

After the table of contents file is created, run the command and give it the filename:

  $ cdrdao --device=0,0 --driver=generic-mmc toc.txt  

  Cdrdao version 1.1.4 - (C) Andreas Mueller <[e-mail]>  

  SCSI interface library - (C) Joerg Schilling  

  L-EC encoding library - (C) Heiko Eissfeldt  

  Paranoia DAE library - (C) Monty  

  Check http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/drives.html#dt for actual driver tables.  

  0,0: YAMAHA CRW8824E Rev: 1.00  

  Using driver: Generic SCSI-3/MMC - Version 1.0 (data) (options 0x0000)  

Assuming the table of contents file is correct and all the files are available, the program will warm up the laser on your CD-RW drive and display a 10-second countdown. At the end of those 10 seconds, it will begin writing the disk. A word of caution: If you are using an IDE CD-RW with SCSI emulation, you do not want to try canceling the write process. IDE-SCSI emulation under Linux does not handle errors very gracefully, and I've been able to completely lock up my machine by trying to cancel a write in progress.

Notice the cryptic way in which I specify the CD writer:

  --device=0,0  

This is related to the way the Linux handles SCSI; it is described in more detail in the Audio CD Creation section of this chapter.

There are also a number of graphical CD-writing programs you can use, such as xcdroast and gtoaster. But since, like my co-authors, I qualify as a command line bigot, I won't discuss them here. If you've had any experience obtaining documentation for open source programs, you should have no trouble finding out how they work.